Universitatea "Cuza" din Iasi, cofondatoarea unui viitor campus academic european
Universitatea "Alexandru Ioan Cuza" (UAIC) din Iasi se afla printre cele câteva universitati românesti care au depus, la data de 28 februarie 2019, proiecte care au in vedere Aliante de Universitati Europene. Alianta de universitati din care face parte UAIC cuprinde sase universitati din Nordul, Sudul, Estul si Vestul Uniunii Europene.
Consortiul îsi propune crearea unui campus universitar de dimensiune europeana, în care cele sase universitati sa îsi partajeze pe scara larga resursele, în care studentii sa poata alege liber cursuri din oricare universitate, în care fiecare universitate si orasul sau sa contribuie la afirmarea valorilor europene în beneficiul tuturor.
"Alianta EC2U va crea un campus universitar de dimensiune europeana, ilustrând valorile europene si contribuind la formarea unui ecosistem inteligent al învatamântului superior printr-un model nou de educatie de calitate într-o societate civica incluziva. Acest model se bazeaza pe dubla strategie de integrare pe verticala si orizontala, producând sinergii din educatie, cercetare si inovare, educatie formala, non-formala si informala, cât si din implicarea comunitatilor academice, municipalitatilor, autoritatilor de reglementare a învatamântului superior, entitatilor socio-economice si cetatenilor. Pâna în anul 2025, Campusul European EC2U va fi realizat integral ca un ecosistem universitar la scara europeana si ca parteneriat unic între mediul academic, municipalitati si actionari socio-economici regionali în slujba viitoarelor generatii de cetateni europeni", se arata in proiect.
Publicație : Bună Ziua Iași
Trei echipe ale TUIASI au propus proiecte pentru incubatorul educational de afaceri JA Bizz Factory
Trei echipe ale Universitatii Tehnice (TUIASI) "Gheorghe Asachi" din Iasi au propus proiecte pentru incubatorul educational de afaceri JA Bizz Factory. Si in acest an, patru echipe ale Universitatii Tehnice s-au înscris în competitia internationala Company of the Year 2019, trei dintre acestea calificându-se în incubatorul educational de afaceri JA Bizz Factory.
Echipele sunt: "Casa 4.0" - studentii Daniel Movila si Gabriel Radu, ambii de la Facultatea de Arhitectura "G.M. Cantacuzino", Mihnea Amihailesei de la Facultatea de Fizica a Universitatii "Alexandru Ioan Cuza" (UAIC) Iasi si Gabriel Achite, tânar antreprenor, "NSIOS" - studentii Monica Isciuc si Dan Matcas, studenti ai Facultatii de Textile-Pielarie si Management Industrial, "Fantastic Dress" - studentii Ioana Candea, Alexandra Tomache, Alexandru Drutu, Madalina Tiba, de la Facultatea Textile Pielarie si Management Industrial.
Primele doua echipe au fost coordonate de catre conf. univ. dr. ing. Cristiana Istrate, în timp ce "Fantastic Dress" a lucrat sub supervizarea sef lucrari dr. ec. Brîndusa Tudose. Competitiile JA sunt cele mai mari competitii europene de antreprenoriat, adresate tinerilor care doresc sa dezvolte un concept de business - competitia JA Business Plan Challenge 2019 - si sa îl testeze ulterior pe piata prin lansarea si conducerea unei afaceri pilot sau a unui start-up - competitia JA Company of the Year 2019.
Anul acesta, finala nationala Company of the Year va avea loc pe 22 mai 2019, la Bucuresti, iar cea internationala, Europe Enterprise Challenge, in perioada 24 - 26 iunie 2019, Oslo, Norvegia.
Anul trecut, echipa BIONIX formata din studentii Corina Cristina Croitoru, de la Facultatea Textile Pielarie si Management Industrial, si Bogdan Nacu, de la Facultatea de Automatica si Calculatoare, coordonata de catre conf. univ. dr. ing. Cristiana Istrate, a câstigat locul al doilea în cadrul finalei nationale a competitiei internationale. Colaborarea dintre TUIASI si JA România se deruleaza în cadrul proiectului "Universitatea Antreprenoriala".
Publicație : Bună Ziua Iași
Pregătire gratuită pentru admiterea la Facultatea de Bioinginerie din cadrul UMF
Elevii care îşi propun să susţină examenul de admitere la Universitatea de Medicină şi Farmacie „Grigore T. Popa“ din Iaşi, în speţă la Facultatea de Bioinginerie Medicală, au oportunitatea de a beneficia de pregătire gratuită la materiile Biologie şi Matematică pentru concursul de admitere. Pregătirea se realizează la disciplinele Biologie, Anatomia şi fiziologia omului, clasa a XI-a, şi Matematică, mai precis Algebră şi analiză matematică, M2.
Experienţa ultimilor ani a dovedit cadrelor didactice de la UMF că elevii care au participat la cursurile de pregătire la Anatomie şi Matematică au obţinut rezultate mai mari decât alţi candidaţi la concursul de admitere, fiind bune spre foarte bune.
„Instruirea de care au beneficiat şi lecţiile periodice i-au ajutat să coreleze informaţiile, să-şi explice anumite fenomene, să găsească răspunsurile la multe dintre problemele cu care s-au confruntat. Şi nu doar atât. Ei au descoperit că în Facultatea de Bioinginerie Medicală pot găsi prieteni şi parteneri de dialog, între cei care vor să ne devină studenţi, dar şi între studenţi şi profesori“, a declarat prof.dr. Anca Galaction, decanul Facultăţii de Bioinginerie Medicală.
Astfel, pregătirea la matematică se face vinerea, de la ora 17.30, în sala 3.4, iar la Biologie miercurea, de la ora 15.30, în sala P7, existând posibilitatea modificării intervalelor orare în funcţie de opţiunile celor care se prezintă, înscrierea făcându-se printr-un e-mail la bioinginerie@umfiasi.ro.
Publicație : Ziarul de Iași
University teaching grades invalid, statistics body says
The Royal Statistical Society has attacked the way in which teaching standards are measured in universities in England - the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) - calling it "invalid".
Urging the statistics regulator to intervene, the society said it was "likely to mislead students who use TEF to inform their university choices".
The Office for Students said that the awards system was still evolving.
An independent review will report on the system by the summer.
The right information?
The TEF is meant to help young people make comparisons about the quality of teaching when they are applying to university.
It gives grades of gold, silver and bronze - but the statistics body is warning that it is not based on sufficiently reliable information.
In December, Universities Minister Chris Skidmore described the measure of teaching as "leading the way in providing students with greater transparency and choice".
But there have been questions about whether it really measures teaching quality - as there are no actual inspections of lectures or tutorials.
It is a paper-based exercise based on available data and written submissions from universities.
And the Royal Statistical Society said "all TEF awards to date are invalid" because of its concerns about how this data is collected, analysed and reported.
How does the system work?
Higher education institutions are assessed on a range of measures, including reported student satisfaction, dropout rates and whether students go on to employment or further study after graduating.
But none of these metrics directly measures the quality of teaching and there are no actual inspections of lectures or other teaching.
Each institution's performance on each measure is then compared against other institutions with a similar intake.
Performance that looks a good deal better or worse than the benchmark is flagged to assessors, who make the final determination of a university's gold, silver or bronze award.
But the Royal Statistical Society said:
- the measures did not assess quality of teaching
- the benchmarking procedure does not properly take account of all of the differences between universities
- the flagging system is trigger-happy - too likely to flag an institution as different from the norm
And as a result, the system may mislead students about the quality of teaching they might receive.
The government is scheduled to receive a report on the TEF from the independent reviewer Dame Shirley Pearce.
The Office for Students, the higher education regulator which oversees the grading system, said it was awaiting the review and would "look forward to its conclusions".
Publicație : BBC News
University staff back prosecuting students who use essay mills
THE survey finds support among academics for harsher punishments for students, following paper that reports ‘surprising’ level of support for criminalising users of contract cheating services
Essay mills should be made illegal and the punishments for students who use them must be harsher, according to academics surveyed by Times Higher Education, following publication of a new journal paper that finds “surprising” levels of support among university staff “for the criminalising of student use of these services”.
The THE survey – based on a self-selecting group of 230 respondents – found 84 per cent believe that essay mills should be illegal. It also found that a significant minority – 41 per cent – believe that students should be criminalised for using such services.
According to one Australian respondent, the scale of contract cheating “is vast, and if we believe otherwise we are kidding ourselves. Any solution that doesn’t place onus back on students as well as contractors is doomed to failure.”
The survey follows a recently published paper by Phil Newton, director of learning and teaching at Swansea University Medical School, and Rebecca Awdry, manager of student conduct at Deakin University in Australia, which analysed a survey of 196 respondents in Australian and UK universities and found that there was “modest, qualified support for the criminalising of student use of these services”. Nearly 50 per cent of those surveyed “strongly agreed” with the idea of criminalising the behaviour of students who engage in contract cheating, the paper reported. However, the authors say that many of these respondents subsequently backtracked on this tough stance later in the survey.
The results of both surveys demonstrate an increasing frustration within academia over the issue of contract cheating. THE’s survey showed that 70 per cent of respondents have suspected one of their students of using contract cheating services, while 63 per cent said that a student of theirs had been proved to have cheated in this way. A 2018 paper by Professor Newton found that it was likely that as many as one in seven recent graduates has used contract cheating services.
Both Professor Newton and Ms Awdry said that they were “surprised” by the number of participants to their survey, carried out in 2016, who indicated support for criminalising students who use commercial contract cheating services. Ms Awdry said that the use of contract cheating can often relate to external pressures placed on young people. “Universities need to continue to be proactive educators. As such, there is more work that can be done to deter this without criminalising these behaviours against students,” she said.
In 2017, the UK’s Department for Education said that it was consulting on a range of options to tackle essay mills in England, including criminalising students, and asked the Quality Assurance Agency to develop them.
The QAA has since convened a working group on academic integrity and Gareth Crossman, the agency's head of policy and public affairs, told THE that it has put together a series of proposals that would require legislation from the government. However, Mr Crossman added that the work had focused on criminalising the operators of essay mills, not the students.
A DfE spokesman said that “universities should also be taking steps to tackle this issue, by investing in detection software and educating students on the severe consequences they face if caught cheating”.
He added that the DfE has “not ruled out bringing forward further legislation to outlaw contract cheating services and essay mills”.
One respondent, who has worked in a “plagiarism office” at an English university, told THE that criminalising students was “the way forward. There are students who for whatever reason prefer to outsource their work to others. For me this is fraud, as this is passing off the intellectual property of another as your own, and doing so results in fraudulently getting a degree that you are not entitled to,” she said.
But the sticking point for many academics is the university’s duty of care towards students and how criminalisation could affect them in later life.
Irene Glendinning, academic manager for student experience at Coventry University, said that she was “seriously opposed” to any legislation on the subject that would result in students having a criminal record. “Our job is to educate students and to help them to get back on track if they stray,” she said. However, she added that universities “should not be afraid to suspend or expel students, as long as we can show they were aware what the consequences would be”.
Others told the THE survey that making essay mills illegal would have a sufficiently deterrent effect on students. “[Criminalising students] would be limited in efficacy in the sense of convictions reducing the number of offenders,” according to an academic at an English university. “But the law holds a moral weight that will make students think twice about using these services to pass a course.”
Cath Ellis, associate dean (education) at Australia’s University of New South Wales, who has researched student and staff views on contract cheating, said that “the students ordering the work, the writers doing the work and the company owners are all probably better able to convince themselves that they are not doing anything wrong because it is not a crime. That’s absolutely a huge problem.”
However, she added that one inevitable consequence of criminalising student behaviour would be a reduction in reported cases. If academics feel that referring potential cheating cases might give a student a criminal record, they are likely to be hesitant to push forward, she said. “This is the opposite of what we want.”
Globally the legal picture is mixed: New Zealand, Ireland and some states in the US have taken steps to make essay mills illegal, whereas in the UK, efforts to tackle essay mills have – as yet – not led to legislation.
THE survey respondents on contract cheating
“Many institutions are in denial about this problem, or so naive that they are only looking for old-fashioned plagiarism” – UK lecturer
“I chair my department’s academic misconduct panel and think contract cheating is extremely difficult to catch” – UK senior academic
“The fact that these services can advertise on the internet and are easy to find has normalised them. Students are now less clear about what is or is not allowed than they were 20 years ago” – lecturer at a continental European university
“It needs to be dealt with with much more rigour than is presently the case and students need to know that it won’t be tolerated and that sanctions will be applied” – Australian head of department
“Criminalising this behaviour would be insane. However, granting degrees to cheaters devalues degrees. Expulsion is a bad enough consequence, but you have to enforce it every time” – US lecturer
“With the monetisation of higher education, institutions increasingly take fees from students who don’t have a reasonable prospect of completing the degree, and see international students in particular as cash cows. To a certain extent, this profit-driven culture almost encourages students to find ways to cheat in order to make their considerable investment worthwhile” – UK teaching fellow
“Course assessment should be designed in a way that essay mills are of no use to students (for example, use of supervised exams, in-class presentations, short turnaround on take-home exams)” – senior lecturer at a continental European university.
Publicație : The Times
Students say failing English universities must be rescued
Hepi survey finds student opinion is in direct opposition to government and regulator policy
More than three-quarters of students say that the government should step in to prevent English universities from closing, in direct opposition to government and regulator policy, new research shows.
The survey, conducted by the Higher Education Policy Institute, found that 77 per cent of students believe that the government should step in if their university were threatened with closure – a view in conflict with the government’s policy on failing providers.
In November 2018, Michael Barber, the chair of the Office for Students, said that the new regulator “will not bail out universities or other course providers in financial difficulty”. Chris Skidmore, the universities and science minister, recently told the House of Commons that “the government do not intend to bail out any independent, autonomous institutions, which is what HE providers are”.
Hepi's survey of 1,048 full-time undergraduate students also found that 51 per cent of students believed that they should be given a full fee refund should their university fail. It found that the least popular option in the event of a university failing would be a merger with another university.
“This does not align well with what is widely expected to happen in the event of institutional failure,” says Hepi’s analysis of the survey. “The Office for Students have said they will not provide financial support for universities in trouble and many believe mergers could happen.”
Previous analysis by Times Higher Education has shown how vulnerable a number of English universities are: many are operating with significant deficits, and some of those with the biggest shortfalls have also seen the biggest falls in student recruitment.
The Hepi research also showed that students are largely unaware of the difficulties institutions are facing and 83 per cent are confident that their own university is in a strong financial position. Most students are not aware of Student Protection Plans – mandatory plans that set out what would happen to students should their provider close – and 93 per cent have not seen their institution’s plan.
However, Hepi found that nearly all students – 97 per cent – would want to know if their university is in financial trouble.
Rachel Hewitt, director of policy and advocacy at Hepi, told Times Higher Education that the contrast between the views of the regulator and of students showed that the debate around the financial status of England’s universities “should be opened up”.
“There’s a huge amount of conversation around what should happen [if a university fails] and what those circumstances are, but actually no one had gone to ask students what they think and whether students understand this issue at all,” she said.
The discussion therefore needs to be broadened, because there is not yet a clear direction that the government should take on this issue, Ms Hewitt continued. “There is the argument that actually students want to know whether universities are in financial difficulties so we should tell them, but there’s also the counter-argument: if we do tell them, what will the consequences be for those universities who are going through financial difficulties?” she said.
The report backs up the idea that universities in financial difficulties would be impacted if their position were made public: 84 per cent of students polled said they would have been less likely to have applied to their university if they had known it was in financial difficulty.
Publicație : The Times
Academia’s grey markets offer rich pickings for the untenured
Marketisation, precarity and global competition have combined to create a vast market for academic ghostwriting, says an anonymous academic
We have all heard the sob stories about the poverty and precarity endured by the tens of thousands of adjunct professors in the US. But what if I told you that these people are only suffering because they have failed to enter or succeed in academia’s grey markets – in which six-figure salaries are the norm?
Times Higher Education recently reported that one UK company offers a “complete PhD service” for £36,000, including thesis composition and viva coaching. The company claims to have “supervised” more than 3,000 customers already. In my well-informed estimation, that represents the tip of the iceberg.
One adjunct I know earns almost $120,000 a year. He works between three and six hours a week teaching a social science at an elite university, earning about $20,000 a term. He spends the rest of his time writing master’s theses and doctorates, charging between $10,000 and $15,000 for the former and about $30,000 for the latter (he leaves the less lucrative undergraduate and master’s papers to the lower end of academia’s shadow professoriate). He types away for two or three months on a beach and doubles his annual income – all perfectly legally.
Immense opportunity has been created by rising tuition fees and the accompanying unwritten rule that prohibits academics from failing students even when they harbour suspicions about the authorship of their submitted work. Universities need to get them in and crank them out – preferably in master’s courses. Who do you think writes all those theses? The students? Get real.
Most dissertations in the social sciences (the area I know best) follow formulaic structures, using standard regression methodologies. Even a dim adjunct only needs a couple of weeks to run the regressions – earning between $5,000 and $7,000 (depending on the complexity and how much explanatory text they provide).
Some more capable adjuncts supplement their incomes further by writing conference papers for colleagues on the tenure track, earning about $10,000. Many of these papers are subject to no formal quality review if you know the conference organisers; the client reads the ghostwritten paper on the plane, delivers it and reports one more bureaucratic tenure hurdle leaped.
But it is journal papers that are the bread and butter of the shadow professoriate. Universities worldwide increasingly require staff to publish several papers a year in journals indexed in Scopus or the Web of Science. If you bought your doctoral dissertation and struggle with your teaching and administration loads, you will never be able to produce original research. But $15,000 will get you around that problem.
Academics in the developing world are the most reliable customers. Global university rankings and the competition they elicit have led universities even here to impose a host of requirements on tenure-track academics and postdoctoral researchers, including acquiring Western degrees and publishing regularly in respectable journals. Because these requirements often come from the ministry, whole faculties need to avail themselves of native English-speaking academic mercenaries to meet them.
Where does the money come from? Well, a young faculty member in a “nearly developed” country can sell about 20 term papers (or straight exam grades) per term for up to $120 per student. The increasing prestige and earning power associated with academic brands makes such outlay worthwhile for the student, while increasing income inequality boosts the numbers of parents rich enough to underwrite it. If the academic also supervises master’s and doctoral students, they can make much more by selling theses and dissertations directly to them, cutting out the middleman.
Again, the market is there because government workers often receive automatic pay increases for a PhD. Typically, the fraudulent theses are reviewed by peers up to the same trick and are never made publicly obtainable, so there is little risk of censure.
One developing world university alone, with five social science departments needing articles, conference papers and essays – as well as theses for the part-time foreign degrees its staff are pursuing by correspondence – generates perhaps 50 customers. Multiply that upwards and you see how much money there is to be made.
I would argue that all this represents the healthy development of future knowledge markets. Universities and colleges will see that simply imposing quantity (as opposed to quality) requirements on professors leads to widespread cheating. Students will realise that they cannot pay others to do their work for them after graduation. And employers will realise that they cannot take a piece of paper bearing an academic logo at face value.
After the market shakes out accordingly, the shadow professoriate will get new titles. They will be called professors. But they won’t be working in a place we recognise as the modern-day university. They will be working in new institutions that thrive on achievement, rather than the fraudulent fruit of a broken hiring and tenure system.
Publicație : The Times
How to equip graduates for the future
In a rapidly changing world, is a broader approach to the university curriculum needed to develop the critical thinking and creativity increasingly sought after by employers, Anna McKie asks
It is a truism to note that the world is changing rapidly. Global warming, population growth and the rise of artificial intelligence and robotics are only some of the more obvious phenomena set to transform society over the coming decades.
It is equally commonplace to note that mitigating these challenges is likely to require the collaboration of multiple academic disciplines. Artificial intelligence, for instance, raises a host of issues not only in computer science but also in law, ethics and social policy.
For this reason, research has become much more interdisciplinary in recent years, with many universities and funders reorientating researchers along thematic rather than disciplinary lines, enlisting them on a range of “grand challenges”.
Yet, so far, the interdisciplinary spirit has typically penetrated less deeply into teaching. That is despite the fact that artificial intelligence is expected to take over many roles that have traditionally been regarded as graduate careers – and will potentially lead to the creation of new careers, as yet unforeseeable. With knowledge also available instantly via the internet, the students of the future are expected to require a flexible range of transferable problem-solving skills if they are to retain a foothold in such a fluid employment environment. And many experts consider that this will require undergraduate teaching to become much broader than has traditionally been the case in most countries.
The idea of students studying more than one subject is not new, but major moves in that direction remain relatively scarce. The UK is a case in point. While Scotland’s four-year undergraduate degrees have always embraced an element of breadth in their early years, those in England, which generally run for only three years, typically remain resolutely monodisciplinary. Joint honours degrees have been offered for decades, but the number of students taking them, far from increasing, is actually in steep decline, falling from 118,300 in 2007-08 to just 38,640 in 2016-17, a drop of 67 per cent, according to Universities UK’s recent Patterns and Trends in UK Higher Education 2018 report.
Moreover, Zahir Irani, dean of the Faculty of Management, Law and Social Sciences at the University of Bradford, believes that traditional UK joint honours degrees were “not thought through properly”. The two halves were merely “bolted together and too unconnected”, he says, because the two departments involved had little interaction with each other.
Irani believes that a better approach is to do away with siloed departments. His faculty will, instead, be loosely structured according to the increasingly interdisciplinary research it does – which students are keen to tap into. “There’s no point doing research if it doesn’t impact the curriculum,” he says. “I want to see that symmetry and alignment. It will have an interesting impact on pedagogy: rather than one person delivering one module, it will be a team-teaching approach.”
Andy Zieleniec, a lecturer in sociology at Keele University, notes that “in the world that many of us grew up in, you became a specialist in one thing and you had a job for life. Increasingly, most people don’t have that security.” Instead, employers are “looking for people who have that critical approach as well as flexibility and comfort in being able to work with different people from a range of backgrounds or disciplines, to come up with a range of different solutions. Students in the workforce will be constantly challenged with the need for new skills and be forced to tackle new problems…We want our students to recognise what it takes to build those skills, and have the confidence to know they can do it.”
For decades, Keele blazed a trail for joint honours. The university was founded in 1949 with a commitment to “equipping the work force for new industrial societal challenges for the future” and, until the 1990s, most of its students were encouraged to study two honours subjects. Although that tradition subsequently fell by the wayside, the university recently decided to reconnect with its cross-disciplinary roots by reviving another of its traditions: the foundation year. This offers undergraduates the opportunity to undertake broad-based interdisciplinary study in their initial year, before embarking on a standard three-year bachelor’s degree.
Rafe Hallett, director of the Keele Institute for Innovation and Teaching Excellence, says the institution is also committed to ensuring that most degree programmes offer opportunities for students to pursue elective courses, unless the demands of professional accreditation prevent it. These electives, though, are not random add-ons: they are packaged into interdisciplinary themes, such as digital futures or sustainability.
In April, Keele will even host a conference on interdisciplinary teaching and learning – although Hallett concedes that it does not have a monopoly on the concept in the UK: he points to UCL and the universities of Manchester and Leeds as institutions that have also taken steps in a similar direction.
“There’s a real trend in the UK to repackage disciplines in a way that will appeal to students who are interested in issue- or theme-based learning: that’s the real crux of this,” he says. “It’s not a betrayal of disciplines but a move beyond them.”
Three years ago, for instance, Keele launched a liberal arts programme. Students study theories, methods and perspective across a range of humanities and sciences, according to Zieleniec, who is the programme director. Of course, liberal arts degrees have a very long tradition in the US, but Zieleniec says that while US students are typically required to specialise in a specific major and minor during their later years, at Keele liberal arts is a degree in its own right, half of whose curriculum is made up of core modules and the other half with electives of the student’s choice.
Liberal arts approaches are beginning to be adopted in Asia, too. India has recently seen several liberal arts universities established, while, in 2011, the National University of Singapore teamed up with Yale University to open the Yale-NUS College in the city state.
Nancy Gleason, director of the college’s Centre for Teaching and Learning, argues that traditional academic disciplines are not suited to “the cognitive challenges of the fourth industrial revolution at undergraduate level”.
In the foreword to a book she edited last year, Higher Education in the Era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (by which term is meant primarily the rise of artificial intelligence), she writes that the well-paying jobs of the future will not only be in the areas of data analytics and cyber security, but also those demanding creativity and critical thinking. Hence, “the response…should be a combination of liberal arts education and upskilling depending on where you are in your educational journey”, she writes.
Interdisciplinary teaching is about acquiring not only a wider knowledge base, Gleason tells Times Higher Education, but also an ability to work with people from other disciplines, and to understand that they approach problems in a different way. For example, graduates employed in the games industry will work not only with computer scientists and programmers but with the artists, psychologists and other social scientists who will all collaborate on the creation of the games’ artificial worlds. A wide grasp of research method will also help citizens distinguish fake news from plausible claims, she adds.
Equally, though, it is likely to become increasingly important for students in non-technical subjects to acquire IT skills. The National University of Singapore announced last year, for instance, that all of its students will be required to study statistics and programming, regardless of their major.
But, in Gleason’s view, higher education’s response to the fourth industrial revolution has so far been “slow and inadequate” – albeit with some notable exceptions.
One of those exceptions might be Arizona State University. Sethuraman Panchanathan, chief research and innovation officer at the institution, agrees, for instance, that “technology and science students should have a lot more appreciation…of what it means to work in the area of humanities and social sciences”. Students trained in an interdisciplinary way will also be better able to play a fruitful part in multidisciplinary research efforts to tackle grand challenges, he adds. To this end, he has replaced the university’s traditional departments with “transdisciplinary schools”, which encourage their students to engage with multiple disciplines.
“Take the School of the Future of Innovation in Society,” he says. “It has faculty members from engineering, policy, business, sustainability…so when a student is a major in a school like that, he or she is embedded in an environment of different disciplines.” The absorption of a range of disciplines into a single programme in this way may also help to overcome one salient criticism of the traditional US major-minor model: that the collection of course credits that students are required to accumulate often lack intellectual coherence and fail even to add up to the sum of their parts, never mind surpass them.
But the US model lends itself more obviously than the UK model to interdisciplinarity and has its echoes in the “ Melbourne model” introduced into Australia in 2008 by the University of Melbourne and since imitated by the University of Western Australia. Melbourne replaced nearly 100 undergraduate courses with just six programmes: arts, biomedicine, commerce, design, music and science. A quarter of students’ time is taken up on “breadth” subjects outside their core subject areas, with professional specialisation reserved, as in the US, for graduate school.
More recently, the University of Sydney has also moved to broaden its own offering, launching a major and minor model in 2018 – although retaining vocational degrees such as engineering, law and medicine at undergraduate level.
Combined degrees and double majors are also being offered at Sydney, as are projects with industry partners and short, stand-alone courses offering what Sydney’s website describes as “foundational knowledge in areas such as design thinking, data analysis, ethics, leadership, programming and cultural competency”. The aim, it says, is that every Sydney student “will complete their bachelor degree with the confidence and ability to think critically, collaborate productively and influence the world” in recognition of the fact that “the next generation of workers is expected to change careers at least seven times in their lives, and about 35 percent of the skills needed today will be different in five years, according to the World Economic Forum”.
Pip Pattison, deputy vice-chancellor (education) at Sydney, tells THE that the university “came to the conclusion that although students need a strong and rigorous grounding in a primary field of study, there’s enormous benefit in gaining expertise in another. This means that they are more agile and better able to take on new perspectives and methods later in life.”
She also acknowledges the connections between interdisciplinary teaching and interdisciplinary research: “We really think it’s important for this kind of approach to happen in a research intensive setting like ours because we see the excitement around interdisciplinary research as something that can inspire students, while also passing on the value of working across disciplines. On the teaching side, it encourages staff to articulate and work through the nature of their own expertise and the nature of their discovery, while thinking about the broader societal and commercial implications of it.”
Other universities have begun efforts to structure their teaching as well as their research around certain grand challenges. For example, the Chinese University of Hong Kong is focused on translational medicine, China studies, sustainability and information and automation technology. However, such challenges often lend themselves much more clearly to some disciplines than to others. Michael O’Sullivan, associate professor of English literature and language at the institution, says that his department has struggled to find its place in this picture. Nevertheless, the department has still been pushed to broaden out its teaching to make it more relevant to the careers that its graduates might pursue. For example, O’Sullivan, whose specialism is modernist and Irish literature, is now teaching a course on graphic novels, in light of the career options in industries such as animation.
However, he is conscious of a risk that the department could spread itself too thinly: “If teachers just do interdisciplinary all the time they might lose their specialism.”
A similar concern also applies to the students themselves. Universities are typically thought of as places where undergraduates get the opportunity to dig deeply into a subject: by giving more priority to breadth at the expense of depth, is there a risk of making them jacks of all trades but masters of none?
Arizona State’s Panchanathan responds by noting that there is a big distinction between unrealistic attempts to make students experts in a number of disciplines and giving them “exposure to the importance of interdisciplinary thinking”. He accepts that students should continue to have a disciplinary focus, so they “are not sacrificing disciplinary expertise, but augmenting it”.
Keele’s Hallett also acknowledges the danger that too much interdisciplinarity would lack intellectual coherence. That is why Keele has instituted “pathways” – along which personal tutors are expected to guide their students – rather than a pick-and-mix free-for-all. Students are required to complete their final-year dissertation or project in their core discipline, while also bringing the interdisciplinary approaches they have learned into it. “We still need to train students in the conventions of a discipline – to the UK’s Quality Assurance Agency’s standard of a discipline – while also looking at others,” Hallett says.
Simon Fokt, a learning technologist at the University of Edinburgh, is also aware of the perils of allowing students to mix and match their education. But his concern is that students’ choices can be too narrow. One of the most exciting things about being an undergraduate, he says, is being confronted by a whole new world of knowledge – including previously unknown subjects. If students instead come to university with a definite idea of what they want to learn and are permitted to curate their own curricula, the window for such discovery is much smaller, Fokt worries.
This is a particular issue in online education, he says, because “there’s only so much you can fit in to these bitesize chunks they are given in – whereas interdisciplinary learning requires you to have a bit more time to explore the connections between the disciplines”. Students’ interest in exploring such connections, he says, can be minimal if they see education merely as a means to a relatively short-term employment end.
On the other hand, while interdisciplinary teaching might be key to ensuring that today’s graduates remain employable for the next four or five decades, Hallett believes that its appeal to undergraduates is often less worldly than that: “Saying ‘we’ll prepare you to solve or deal with societal challenges’ is very attractive to students,” he says. “Rather than saying ‘you’ll leave with competencies that [professional services firm] Deloitte likes’, we say ‘you’ll leave being able to contribute to ethical, moral or societal challenges’, which is more attractive to an 18-year-old today than the notion of having what employers want.”
One issue for universities that want to embrace cross-disciplinary teaching is that it can be tricky to get academics to break out of the disciplines they have spent their whole careers working within.
O’Sullivan admits that “there has been some conflict” within his department at the Chinese University of Hong Kong over the requirement for academics to broaden their curriculum beyond literary standards. “Some people feel that English should be taught to the canon,” he says. And he agrees that “there has to be a balance as we need to maintain our reputation as an English literature and linguistics department”.
For Hallett, the key is to challenge the mindset that “your discipline is your territory to be protected”. One way to do that is to emphasise the inherent intellectual interest of being “open to challenges from other disciplines about how you might address knowledge. It takes courage to put your discipline under the spotlight but if that’s done well then students feel they are part of a really live debate about these issues.”
That debate, Hallett says, can be catalysed if university teachers are involved in interdisciplinary research into grand challenges: “When tackling an issue such as sustainability, we know that it’s useful to have the perspective from natural sciences, business and enterprise, politics and others – all the things that might affect how sustainability is understood. Collaboratively taught modules and programmes are the natural output of that work.”
For this reason, Hallett continues, universities looking to introduce interdisciplinary teaching should begin their search for pioneers in their existing research institutes and clusters, where “you are more likely to find people who are working together with colleagues from different disciplines. When it comes to research-led education, the challenge is to make the vibrancy of those institutes work in relation to curriculum design, so you don’t just go back to the disciplinary pathways when you are teaching.”
Pattinson emphasises that Sydney’s radical reform of its undergraduate curriculum has not been straightforward: “You can only really have the whole university rethink its curriculum every 50 to 100 years.” But the university “listened to our stakeholders and what the research says about what it takes to build broader skills, what students say they want in an educational experience, and what the labour market says it wants in graduates. Luckily, all of these things are actually very well aligned and it was pretty clear what the core requirements were.”
Most Sydney staff have been supportive of the changes. “But they certainly did not want interference in the way they teach their core expertise, so we did not tamper with that,” Pattinson says. “What we did was really to restructure the whole thing at a macro level.”
Meanwhile, Panchanathan’s experience at Arizona State has convinced him that those seeking widespread institutional buy-in need to do more than just communicate the inherent value of interdisciplinary teaching and research. “The important thing, if you want faculty to work across disciplines, is that you have to recognise them for doing so,” he says. “You need to reward them to do it, such as through their tenure or promotion [criteria]. Then, once you embed [interdisciplinarity] into the faculty, the students will embed it, too.”
Publicație : The Times
Privileged students fill majority of degree apprenticeship places
Proportion of places taken by disadvantaged students shrinks as level of qualification rises
Research published on 7 March by the Office for Students showed that 28 per cent of degree-level apprenticeship starters aged under 21 in 2016-17 were from neighbourhoods classed as quintile 5 under the Participation of Local Areas (POLAR) classification. These are the areas that are most likely to send students into higher education. A further 26 per cent were from quintile 4, the second-most privileged areas.
In contrast, only 13 per cent were from quintile 1, the most disadvantaged neighbourhoods, and 17 per cent were from quintile 2.
The data are for apprenticeships at levels 6 and 7 under the Regulated Qualifications Framework, which lead to bachelor’s or master’s degrees, or equivalent qualifications. They will raise questions over whether the development of apprenticeships in England has helped to widen entry to higher education, or has provided an opportunity for middle-class school-leavers to cement the advantages that they already enjoy in terms of access to conventional degree courses.
The OfS data show that students from the bottom two POLAR quintiles represent a greater share of the intake of degree apprenticeships than full-time higher education courses (30 per cent versus 26 per cent).
However, the proportion of places taken up by poorer school-leavers becomes progressively lower as the level of the apprenticeship increases, while the percentage filled by richer students increases. For example, under-21s from the bottom two quintiles account for 43 per cent of apprentices on level 3 courses – equivalent to A levels – while students from the richest quintiles account for 36 per cent.
The OfS report says that that 10,870 students are reported to have started degree-level apprenticeships in 2017-18, more than in all the previous years combined. However, these level 6 and 7 apprentices still account for slightly under 3 per cent of all apprentices who began that year, and 1.5 per cent of the 730,000 students who started equivalent degree qualifications.
In 2014-15, fewer than five universities and colleges offered degree-level apprenticeships, but 47 universities and 56 colleges took part in projects funded by the Degree Apprenticeship Development Fund in 2016-17 and 2017-18.
The OfS report says that “the early signs are that the benefits of degree apprenticeships are being enjoyed…by young school leavers from disadvantaged backgrounds”. But it adds that “there is an imperative to bring the proportions of disadvantaged learners closer to those found in apprenticeships at a lower level”.
Publicație : The Times
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